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Tuesday, September 20, 2011

A Review of the film HANNA

Hanna: A Review

I
should make a rule. If a movie blurb
has the acronym CIA in it, I should pass.
I got suckered by the idea of a wild child being raised in the back
woods of Finland. I wanted to see
Finland. That's why I rented the movie
HANNA. Everything else was loaded with
the usual signals. CIA, CIA, CperiodIperiodAperiod.

The
CIA has become a cinematic boogeyman, a
narrative trope for deception, rogue agents who are awesome martial artists,
plots within plots within plots, old paper files that should have been burned
at the end of the Cold War, EVIL, pure old fashioned EVIL. This is our main national security agency,
the one that sets the paradigm. It's
interesting how much we depend on it and hate it. No one imbues the DIA, the NSC, the FBI or dozens of other
acronymic agencies with such an aura of sinister misdirection. No other agency is synonymous with THE BIG
LIE.

Here
is the movie, HANNA, directed by Jon Wright, and starring Saoirse Ronan as the
waif-like uber-warrior, martial artist supreme. My first problem was simply working out the pronunciation of the
girl's name. Turns out it's pronounced
Seer-sha. Hoooray! I think the Irish are just having a laugh at
our expense, cleaving with ethnic loyalty to the old Gaelic names. I can imagine it, the Christening of a girl
child, and the parents confer in ponderous whispers. "Let's call her Riaoirdhagnha-hna." Couldn't just call her Riordan, could ya?

I'm
having a bit of fun, certainly not slinging ethnic slurs. The Irish are entitled to defiance. As are the Blacks, the Jews, the Arabs, the
Ethiopian Coptics, the Mormons, The Kurds and everyone else. No one needs opt out of defiance. It's the national creed of all nations. Oh say can you seeeeee?

Let
me see if I can compress the plot of this movie into a logical sequence.

A while ago, in the
mid-nineties, the CIA funded a program to mess with genetic sequencing via
in-vitro fertilization. The idea was to
see if they could produce a SUPER SOLDIER, a warrior with superior reflexes,
intelligence, better vision, better hearing, greater strength and so
forth.

If
we want to trace the origins of this cliche, we may go back to sci fi maven Isaac Asimov
writing in the fifties and then fast forward twenty years to Bionic Man.

This
program (the one in the movie) produced maybe twenty children and then the
bottom dropped out of it. The film gives us a five second vignette of fast cuts of news and magazine items. Apparently a certain number of children met untimely deaths, around the same time and locale. Guess the CIA didn't want freaky little chromosome carriers
running around the world.

There's
a flashback scene of Cate Blanchett stepping out from behind a snow-bound road
sign and firing six or eight or ten shots from her nine millimeter Beretta at
an oncoming car. The vehicle contains a man, a woman, and a toddler. This brilliant, foolproof assassination plan doesn't work. My goodness! The toddler's mother is dying in the snow
and curses Blanchett's character, agent Marrisa Wiegler, with her final words:
"You'll never take her." Or was it, "You'll never
find her?" Whatever. Male
person/daddy and super-toddler have vanished into the eerie north woods.

There
must be another rule, a Hollywood rule, that if you have a movie that's just
middling in quality and if you can land Cate Blanchett in the cast it will add
enough class to the project to push it uphill a notch into cinematic
respectability.

I
must admit that Blanchett played her high level agent like the perfect Wicked
Witch. "Come here, child, I won't
hurt you," she says with a voice like dry ice. We know her character's nuts by the way she brushes her
teeth. She attacks her gums until she
can spit blood. It's interesting that
Blanchett distances herself in the movie's credits. It's hard to discover that she is actually IN the movie. In spite of
near-dominant screen time, she's a somewhat hidden "And Cate
Blanchett" way back in the cast credits.

Okay
okay okay. The movie was
entertaining. It was as saturated with
cliche as a Denny's waffle is with maple syrup. Two thirds of the film time was taken up with chases. Watch out for chases. Rule Number twenty three: long chases are
evidence of the director's lack of imagination.

At
the end of the movie the chasing goes on in an abandoned theme park with
headless dinosaurs and roller coaster tunnels.
The final scene has Blanchett emerging from the mouth of the Big Bad
Wolf.

I
never quite figured out why Blanchett was chasing Hanna through the park and
then suddenly Hanna was chasing Blanchett through the park. It didn't make sense. Did Marissa Wiegler (that's another thing,
was she a German with a Southern accent?
Or a Southern with a German accent?.
Sheeesh.) Each had hurt the
other. Hanna had created a functioning
crossbow while running full tilt through the abandoned theme park. Blanchett had shot Hanna somewhere near the
abdomen but apparently her super genes included quick healing. There was some symbolic dwelling on
Wiegler's shoes in an earlier scene.
Apparently these shoes are the witch's undoing, because she slips,
ooops, just at the climactic moment of confrontation, and goes head first down
some bobsled track thingy. Then the
ironic comments get to be uttered.
"I just missed your heart", says Hanna, in a reference to the
first scene in the film when she's hunting a caribou buck and mercifully gives
him the coup de grace. She told the
magnificent animal, with appropriately aboriginal predator/prey bonding,
"I just missed your heart."

I
guess I won't be spoiling anything to say that the movie ends with a bang.

I
rate it three muskrats. Coulda
been better. Fairly entertaining.
Coulda been a lot worse.

About Me

A Midwesterner by birth, I migrated to the West Coast just in time to be a hippie but discovered that I related better to the Beatniks. I harkened back to an "old school" world of hard bop, Coltrane, jazz, poetry, painting and photography. A large part of my life went "off the rails" and I experienced the reality of the streets for too long. Putting myself back together was the defining experience of my life so far. It wasn't easy. It did, however, nurture the writer in me. I have written novels, memoirs, poems, humorous fake emails, and commercials

for ridiculous non existent products. I have a passion for astronomy, history, psychology, the pure abstract absurdity of human experience (what the hell is it?). My partner is an honest to god Animal Communicator, as nutty as that may sound to some people. She is the real deal. She also suffers from Fibro and it's a curse with which we must work every day. Come visit my blog and